Having your ‘own way of doing things’ is great a lot of the time…it’s good to be original, to be a bit of a maverick on occasion…to want to make your own mark.

But when it comes to how things work inside a business, everyone having their own way of doing things, is a recipe for a lot of wasted time and money, if not complete business disaster.

It’s the same when you’re starting out on your own, and you learn how to do a particular task…you spend hours working out how to do it, to make sure you get it just right, to get the result and standard that you’re happy with…and then you don't have to do that piece of work again for what…? …a month, maybe a quarter , or even a year. What happens when you come back to it? How much have you remembered? Some of the basics probably, but what about the detail that got you to the standard you wanted? So you do it to the best of your memory, not as enthusiastically, or to the same standard as the first time, and again, all that effort…all that time and money (remember how much you cost your business) wasted.

When you talk to a business owner about the need to create standard processes and operating procedures and document them, you see them visibly shut down at the thought of this mammoth, soul-shrinking task. They get that it will make their business more efficient, but they just can’t face doing it.

Yet, if we start creating processes early enough in our business life, it’s not a mammoth task at all. As we complete a new piece of work, as we learn something new, we simply write down how we did it…how we got to the result we wanted. That’s all a process is.

And in doing that - notes that would take us maybe 15-30 minutes to write up - we create a step by step blueprint for any member of our team to follow…or for us to follow when that task comes round again.

The huge benefit for us as we build our team, is that we can focus fully on the really important stuff that will help grow our business, completely confident that the day to day is being managed to our high standards, following the logical, effective processes that we created.​Who wouldn’t want that?